Yeah, this wasn’t the best month for me, either, but I still really appreciate Humble Monthly. Biggest disappointment might actually be that the Humble Original looks totally unappealing. Sometimes these are quite good, or at least interesting. Vape Escape?? Nah.
I’m happy to see some of you haven’t played Hard Reset yet, it’s great! Resi Revelations is worth playing too. The raid mode is a really tough challenge.
Re: december, apparently we get an extra copy of MGS Phantom Pain to give away as a gift.
Cities Skyline is all one key. I’ve enjoyed over 200 hours with that game. The economics & city growth stuff leaves a lot to be desired, but battling traffic problems is pretty fun. Lots of mods in the Steam workshop. After Dark is not an important DLC. You basically get some cool looking commercial buildings / districts and taxi cabs.
And I bought it back in September, from the Humble Store no less. On sale for $4.50, so I don’t really want a refund even if I could get one. Not interested in Cities Skyline, so next month’s bundle is a bust.
Actually I was intending to cancel my monthly sub, but I’ll just pause it again instead in order to hold onto the 10% discount on purchases. Might come in handy around Thanksgiving.
Same here, probably for similar-ish reasons.
To me, the Humble Bundle is kind of like ordering the chef’s special at a restaurant. You’re basically saying “Here’s my money, surprise me.” And lots of times (for me and my tastes), the Humble Bundle has been a really wonderful surprise. For a few months, it hasn’t been lately, and it’s easy enough to pause or cancel and resub.
It isn’t really about the $12 at all. But I still don’t feel like spending it if I already have the reveal games or they don’t appeal to me.
I can only think of one bundle so far where none of the games in it interested me. I usually get one or two from the wishlist, another couple or so that I wasn’t aware of that look interesting, and maybe another 1 or 2 that I’d never consider buying, but as long as I’m getting them, I’ll give a shot.
That said, I’ve been considering stopping, just because the backlog is getting ridiculous now.
I just went to pause November and it offered me $2 off I decided not to pause. I have both the headliners so it’s not of interest to me regardless. Might be worth trying however if you want the November package! Also, it takes way longer to actually go through the pause process now, they are very keen for you not to do that :-/
Thanks robc04! Guess I’ll unpause after two months of wait and see. This time they don’t have any multiplayer-focused game in the early reveals and I’ve been eyeing Cities for a while now.
Even when I had paused, I had to gasp at the November unlocks. I certainly didn’t expect to see a 10 year old game to be part of a Monthly. The bundle quality as a whole is good, but a few titles don’t quite belong in there IMO.
Exactly @Khelavaster , I mean last year there were over 7,672 games released on Steam, how is it that they can’t find 120 games from last year to split up over the course of 12 months this year is beyond me.
And with the way older stuff is bundled left and right now, Humble monthly needs to get some rule in place where it isn’t giving us games that are older than say 2 years.
For the December bundle I did the above mentioned I want to cancel, oh hey $2 off you say for not canceling? Ok I’ll stay. So they have me for another month.
Including Sniper Elite 1 and 2 is particularly egregious (and I say that as someone that really likes Sniper 2), given that both games have been given away for free and the vastly superior Sniper Elite 4 was in a monthly not long ago. I haven’t subscribed to the monthly for about a year and a half now because none of the reveals have caught my eye and I don’t buy based on unknowns, but this seems like an obvious deterioration in the unlocks.
Sniper Elite 1 & 2 do seem rather odd. I certainly don’t begrudge headliners from 2015; the publishers have to agree to have their stuff included and doing so—thanks to the popularity Humble has attained—pretty much destroys any tail outside of DLC sales. Yet including games which have essentially been deprecated doesn’t make a lot of sense (that said, Sniper Elite 2 still had a peak yesterday of few hundred simultaneous players according to Steamspy). Throwing in a more recent random indie game or two in their place would have been better imho. But nobody’s perfect and not everyone has my taste in games. Still another solid $12, just not as fantastic as others have been.
I don’t think the monthly cannibalizes that many future sales. The last time it was possible to estimate the subscriber counts, they’d been stable at 150k for a long time with occasional bumps to 200k for particularly good headline reveals (new high profile games, where the bundle price was lower than the game was being discounted for normally; Civ 6 and Total Warhammer were good examples).
Two things stand out. First, the absolute subscriber numbers are small compared to the sales, even the long tail sales, of AAA games. Second, it appears that their core audience really is just looking to get games in bulk, and doesn’t react a lot to the exact selection of games. So most of them were never going to buy these games any other way. If you haven’t bought MGS V by now, you were never going to make an active decision to buy it).
Clearly the bundles are not all equal, in terms of average buyer appeal and cost to Humble. It would make sense that Humble occasionally uses marquee bundles to lock-in new subscribers. Put another way, Humble most likely looks at cost/value of bundles over the average period of subscription, not solely as one offs. Frankly, most subscribers do the same. I suspect only a minority of subscribers are min-maxers who suspend and activate on a marginal bundle basis.
As an aside, I’ve never worked on a AAA before so to me that’s a lot of units. But yes, as games get older the number of people who would buy it on another platform drops off precipitously. I’m worried that perhaps you think I’m saying it’s a bad/dangerous thing for publishers to put their games in Humble Bundles. Quite the contrary; I was just trying to echo why there aren’t a whole bunch of brand new big-name games.
My approach is to get the bundle if the lead game is something I really want. XCOM 2 was a perfect example of that. If I don’t really want the lead game I will pass on the bundle.
The monthly bundle are still a good deal, for example the last one was totally worth it just for Hitman.
As the OP I will note that they were dead to me not because of low quality monthly bundles but because of their ill advised foray into making the bundles all in one codes. This thread preceded the monthly bundle by -years-
And I remain pretty damn happy with the monthly bundle contents and my ability to spin off dupes and unwanted games as shareable codes. The problem fundamentally seems to be people trying to game the system by predicting ‘weak’ months. That’s just silly to me. Take the good with the bad and the average is way way way above the nominal monthly value. If you treat it like gambling you are going to be disappointed. That’s how I see it anyway, you guys are free to bitch or cheer as you see fit. Just know I’m sitting here all judgmental about ya.
It’s only way above the nominal value if you don’t own (or can usefully recycle codes for) the games in it. But that’s why I stick to the months I know I want the headliners.
Humble recently said they’ve got 450,000 subscribers.
In non-monthly news, the yearly Rpg Maker bundle is back:
The 1$ tier has my favorite version of the program. It’s 10 years old though, so YMMV.
Their month long gamejam this year is a little different.
You have one month to deliver a one hour game, any game you can dream up, for the chance to win massive cash prizes. … Instead of looking for a complete package, we are looking for the next big indie game. We want to work with the winner to turn the contest build of their game, into a full commercial game.
Three $ prizes, any engines, prototypes instead of completed games. Sounds like a good opportunity if anyone has some free time and might’ve been interested in throwing something on Steam direct etc. One of my friends is working on one with their teenage kid. I’ll probably participate as well if I can fit it in my schedule.
Last year’s submissions if anyone wants to check out what the competition is like. A terrible depression experience game I made in ~4 hours ended up in the top 25%. Other past winners include Remnants of Isolation, Last Word, & Corine Cross Dead and Breakfast.
This. The monthlies are a great value if you haven’t bought many of what they’re including. I’ve been trying to buy less games to save some money. I hope a side effect of this is that in the future the monthlies will be a greater value to me. I enjoy the anticipation of seeing what’s next. I’ve only bought into 1 or 2 months up until now. I took the 3 month membership to get Kingdom Come, but will go back to month by month - looking at the initial reveals.
FYI, I had an annual subscription due to renew, so cancelled and let it lapse… in the hopes of getting one of those emails with a free game to entice me to re-subscribe. Which I just got - Pathfinder: Kingmaker was the offer.